


The Bored Are Never Clever

by Elsinore_and_Inverness



Category: Doctor Who, Sherlock (TV)
Genre: A lot of talking, Fluff and Angst, Gen, Quite a bit of flirting tbh, Tea, Unutterably pretentious waiting for Godot Reference, Wibbly wobbly explain-y wain-y stuff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-24
Updated: 2017-09-24
Packaged: 2019-01-05 02:07:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,882
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12180804
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Elsinore_and_Inverness/pseuds/Elsinore_and_Inverness
Summary: The TARDIS takes the Doctor to visit Sherlock Holmes





	The Bored Are Never Clever

All gone. Everyone was gone. The Doctor gazed dejectedly up at the ceiling of the TARDIS. He wished he could feel more appreciation for the mildew-y old console room. He was vaguely aware that the lights were set too dark and he was straining his eyes. The Doctor shivered slightly, he had shut the central heating off again, at the very least he should put his coat on. Instead he sat uncharacteristically still, too exhausted too sleep, and too miserable to cry. 

He was hurting the TARDIS. They were symbiotically connected, and his despondency was slowing destroying her. They would go out together, he and she, of that he was certain. Like a binary star system collapsing to dust. He closed his eyes and buried his face in his hands. Rose gone. That was just self-pity. She would be fine, he was there for her after all. Martha gone. Martha and Mickey would be better off without him, he'd brought nothing but heartbreak on that front. Donna gone. And she didn't even remember. It hurt him almost physically. What was the point? 

Gallifrey gone. Over ten billion Gallifreyans dead, and millions of other worlds he could not save. It didn't bear thinking about. He would drive himself mad. He already had. Because he thought he heard the groaning of the time rotor.

He opened his eyes. The time rotor was glowing bright blue. Reminding him that he was not alone. The amount of energy it would take the TARDIS to overcome the emotional input from the briode nebulizer was ridiculous. He was crying again. He stood up, and kissed the control panel. "Thank you, old girl."

\---

Sherlock Holmes was bored. He was lying on the couch talking to himself. 

"John, I'm bored." 

Silence. 

"Bored! Bored! Bored!"

Silence.

"John, find me a case." 

Silence. 

"So, I've been researching organized crime..." 

Silence.

"John, by the grace of God, King of England..." 

Silence. 

"Know that, having regard to God and the salvation of our soul, and those of all our ancestors and heirs..." 

Silence. 

"Can you hand me my violin?" 

Silence.

"Can you hand me a pen?"

Silence.

"Now is the winter of our discontent..."

Nothing but the sound of cars passing on the street below, a drizzle of rain against window. Music drifting up from a few blocks over.

He decided to go to his mind palace. Sherlock closed his eyes. Changing rooms and lots of corridors to run down.

Running down corridors.

Something about running.

Strange occurrences. Unexplained happenings. The stuff mysteries are made on.

\---

Somewhere out in the dark the TARDIS materialized. 

"Where are we, old girl?" The Doctor whispered. He pushed the door open and glanced up at the street sign. 

"Baker Street?" He wondered.

\---

Somewhere up in the dark Sherlock Holmes opened his eyes. He had heard the most extraordinary sound. It was like the emotive moaning of an engine or the grating gears of an injured animal. Something about it registered with something deep in his human conscious. He scrambled to his feet and ran downstairs.

\---

Somewhere down in the dark a door swung open. A black door with gold lettering that read "221b." The Doctor peered through the dark. The streetlights flickered. Always a sign. A man stood in the doorway. A tall thin man, but not quite as tall and thin as the Doctor. He approached the Doctor. Wearing a dressing gown, the man had messy black curls and an odd angular face. His slanting blue-green eyes gleamed in the dark.

\---

In the dark, Sherlock walked towards the man in the street. The streetlights flickered.

"Who are you?" he asked, examining the man's freckly pale bony face. The stranger's brown hair stuck up at random angles and his sherry-colored eyes glittered. 

"I'm the Doctor."

\---

"Do you know who I am?" asked the man in the street. The Doctor shook his head. 

"Then why are you here?" he asked. "Wait. No. Don't tell me... Slight redness around the eyes, you've clearly been crying, rumpled suit that you've been wearing for too long, filthy trainers, hair deliberately ruffled like you're still trying to impress someone... You've been wandering alone for some time, but not that long, you've recently lost someone, probably a girl. Let's see... profession: clothes are self-consciously geeky, some sort of scientist, maybe, hmm, but the jacket's sewn out of scraps, so maybe... An actor?"

The Doctor raised an eyebrow. "I said I was the Doctor." 

"Are you sure you don't know who I am?" the man asked, "oh, the eyes are dilating now; you're afraid of something."

"Self-satisfied smirk, something about that nose, fluffy hair that hasn't been combed, faint smell of tobacco... Sherlock, does the name Sir Arthur Conan Doyle mean anything to you?"

\---

"Stupid. Stupid. I'm an idiot. This isn't right." The Doctor berated himself.

Sherlock shook his head, there was something about that name. 

"Thing is, I don't actually think you are, and that's scaring me."

"You don't think I'm an idiot... Well, that makes a total of one. In the universe." The Doctor said.

"One person that I don't think is an idiot?"

"One person that thinks I'm not an idiot."

"Well that does make mathematical sense." Sherlock decided, "if no one else knows anything."

"Well, I think most people know some things, like how the Earth revolves around the sun." the Doctor disagreed.

"It does?" Sherlock wondered.

"Humans continually amaze me."

"It amazes me that you humans should be amazed by me." 

"Oh!" the Doctor realized, "I must not have made myself clear."

Thunder sounded overhead.

"Let's go inside." Sherlock said, taking the Doctor's hand and discreetly taking his pulse.   
170 beats per minute. Either his heart was fibrillating badly, or... Sherlock met the man's luminous brown eyes.   
Sherlock shifted his grip from the Doctor's hand to his wrist. There were definitely two heartbeats.   
The Doctor glanced curiously at Sherlock's fingers pressed against the arteries of his wrist. 

"So d'ya think I'm healthy?" 

"You... Your heart... You're- You're not-"

"Yes." The Doctor agreed.

Sherlock felt the Doctor's blood moving under his fingertips.

Duh-duh duh-duh. Like a drumbeat in 4/4 time.

"But that's not possible." Sherlock shook his head.

"Whenever you have eliminated the impossible..." The Doctor began.

"Whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth." Sherlock finished. "You're not human." He concluded.

"Never said I was!" The Doctor said brightly, bouncing on the toes of his converse trainers. "But do let's go inside."

Sherlock released his grip on the Doctor's wrist. He held the door open obsequiously, "entrez-vous." 

"Allons-y." The Doctor agreed. 

"Your pronunciation is terrible." Sherlock admonished.

"Thank you." The Doctor agreed. "Nothing quite like French in an English accent."  
"What are you?" Sherlock asked.

"You told me not to tell you." the Doctor complained petulantly, as they sat down across the table from one another.

"I told you not to tell me why you were here. I know why you're here." Sherlock protested.

"And why am I here?" the Doctor challenged.

"Because you're lost." Sherlock said simply. 

"Lost." The Doctor echoed. 

"Those eyes!" Sherlock frowned. "How have you come by such ancient eyes?"

"Oh these? I've not had them more than four years. I'd always had blue eyes previously, it made a nice change." The Doctor said, indicating his eyes. He blinked, "Oh, that did sound strange, I'm sorry."

"You don't- I don't think that you- What? What are you? What ARE you?" Sherlock stood up and began pacing about the room.  
The Doctor looked around the disorderly room, observing the bookshelves and chaotic piles of random artifacts, places where the wallpaper was torn, the smiley face splashed across one wall. Seriously, what was with that smiley face? It was sort of creeping him out.

"You're obviously an advanced life form..." Sherlock theorized.

"Oh? Thank you! I think you're an advanced life form too." The Doctor responded, almost coquettishly.

"And you arrived by some unusual means of conveyance that made the most extraordinary noise."

"Yes, she does, doesn't she? I think maybe I'm doing something wrong."

"You didn't know who I was immediately, and then you mentioned..."

"Sherlock, I need you to pay attention." The Doctor insisted. 

"I'm a consulting detective, I'm in the business of paying attention." Sherlock pointed out.

"Except when you're bored. Boredom is the mother of intellectual laziness."

"I'm not bored." Sherlock insisted.

"Okay, good, but you're never going to figure out who I am, if there's nothing in that mind palace of yours past the Earth's atmosphere." The Doctor continued.

"You make it seem like the Earth's atmosphere stops short of the tip of my nose." Sherlock complained.

"Well, in the grand cosmic scheme of things, it does." The Doctor pointed out.

"But-"

"You've got a lovely nose. Now shut up... I arrived in a ship called the TARDIS."

"TARDIS." Sherlock pronounced. "T-A-R-D-I-S... Technologically Advanced Radon Dominated Interactive Symbiosis..."

"Something like that." The Doctor agreed.

"Terribly Accurate Response-Delayed Interstellar System." Sherlock guessed.

"That's closer." The Doctor nodded, "Think Hemingway."

"Time and Radon-"

"There's no radon, but there is quite a lot of gold and zieton-7... Think Einstein."

"Time And Relative Delayed..."

"It's not delayed!" The Doctor exhorted.

"Yes it is." Sherlock smiled. "Time And Relative Dimensions In Space." 

The Doctor applauded. 

"No, don't. That took me forever... How did you know I have a mind palace?" He asked. 

"I didn't, I was just being poetic... And I suppose on some level everyone has a mind palace..."

"On some level everyone has a brain as well, that doesn't mean they know how to use it."

"You know how to use your brain." The Doctor observed. 

"Do you do this with everyone?" Sherlock asked.

"Well, that wouldn't make mathematical sense, now would it? But that doesn't change the fact that..." The Doctor paused, confused.

"The fact that what?" Sherlock asked.

"You're not supposed to be here."

"What do you mean I'm not supposed to be here? You're a space alien. If anyone's not supposed to be here, it's you." Sherlock protested.

"I'm not supposed to be anywhere." The Doctor pointed out.

"Stop. Stop. Stop it. No crying allowed." Sherlock commanded. 

The Doctor blinked tears out of his eyes. "Can I just start from the beginning?" He asked.

"By all means." Sherlock conceded, "Don't be boring!" 

"250 million light years away, in a group of galaxies you call the Perseus cluster, there is a constellation called Kasterborous and a planet called Gallifrey. It just so happens that the inhabitants of that planet discovered time travel. I was born on this planet Gallifrey."

Sherlock shook his head, "I wouldn't believe any of this if I hadn't felt your heartbeat."

"Two hearts." The Doctor agreed. "On Gallifrey, I grew up in the shadow of my older brother."

"Ooh." Sherlock groaned sympathetically. "I know how that is." 

"Mycroft?" The Doctor guessed.

"What was yours?" Sherlock asked.

"Irving." The Doctor answered.

"I always thought I was an idiot." They said in unison.

Sherlock laughed humorlessly. "My brother is basically the government, and he's managed to get me out of quite a few scrapes."

"Mine too," the Doctor agreed, "that's how I got off my planet in the first place."

"This is ridiculous." Sherlock decided. 

"It was, I spent hundreds of years intermittently on the run from, or working with, my people, until..." The Doctor froze, realizing something even more bizarrely incongruous than a real living Sherlock Holmes in the 21st century. "You've never seen aliens before."

"You're my first."

"But, just recently they invaded your world." He insisted, "They moved the entire planet to the medusa cascade and one second out of sync with the rest of the universe."

"What?" Sherlock wondered.

"Do you think it's possible... Just possible, that you might not have been paying attention?" 

"I don't want to think so, but it is just possible."

The Doctor took a deep breath, attempting to calm his terrified heartbeats. 

"Something's gone wrong with spacetime." The Doctor snorted slightly. "Sorry, that's just the typical state of affairs for me... And you're right; I really shouldn't be here, Sherlock Holmes can't know of the existence of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, that would, like, completely destroy reality or something."

"Who's Sir Arthur Conan Doyle?" Sherlock asked. The Doctor looked completely exhausted. "Would you like a cup of tea?" He offered. The Doctor nodded. "I don't quite trust you not to accidentally poison me... But at this point I don't really care."

"You should care. Wait. Back up, tell me what happened to you." Sherlock.

"But don't you..." The Doctor began.

"You're here in front of me, that makes you more important than McArthur Cathode Boyle." Sherlock admitted.

"The morality of care." The Doctor observed.

"Morality of care, it isn't fair." Sherlock rhymed in a sing-song voice.

"But it happens anyway." The Doctor sighed. Sherlock nodded, he stood up and the Doctor watched him walk over to the kitchen. He rested his chin in his hands, what could only be described as cutely. 

Sherlock returned a few minutes later, with two steaming cups of tea. 

He set one in front of the Doctor.

"Tell me what happened."

The Doctor sipped his tea.

"It began long ago, on the planet Skaro. There was a war, between the Kaleds and the Thals. The planet was drenched in radiation, and the Kaleds mutated into the Daleks. The Daleks became convinced that they should be the only life form in existence, and waged war against the rest of the universe. Eventually they developed time travel and went to war with the Gallifreyans. There was a series of Great Time Wars. The last of which..." The Doctor stared into his tea. 

"What happened?" Sherlock asked quietly. 

"I destroyed my planet." The Doctor whispered even more quietly. 

"Then what?" Sherlock asked, sensing there was more to the story. 

"It's not a fairytale, Holmes." The Doctor snapped.

"I think we all know the way of fairytales." Sherlock sighed.

"No happy endings." The Doctor shook his head. "I travelled alone for a while, until I met Rose."

"That's the girl." Sherlock noted.

"But then she got trapped in a parallel world." The Doctor looked miserable. "After that... Well, Donna saved my life, really." 

"Donna?" Sherlock asked. 

"Accidentally kidnapped her, she sort of freaked out and left, then I met Martha... Martha fancied me. Bit of a problem."

"Had that problem." Sherlock nodded.

The Doctor raised an eyebrow, "I don't doubt it." He sipped the tea again. 

"So Martha left, after a complicated mess involving the end of the universe, a man from the 51st century that Rose accidentally made immortal, and my arch-nemesis-slash-used-to-be-best-friend, who died, and then Donna found me again... When the Daleks pulled Earth into the medusa cascade, Rose had managed to jump back over to this world, so we were briefly reunited... Then I got shot by a Dalek, and I was regenerating-"

"Regenerating?" Sherlock wondered, his expression asking 'am I supposed to be this confused?'

"Complete cellular regeneration. Every cell reformed into a new body." The Doctor explained. 

"So I was regenerating, but Jack had kept my severed hand." 

"Wait. What?" Sherlock asked.

The Doctor's eyes sparkled with amusement. "Jack's the immortal one. After my last regeneration, my hand was cut off, but I had enough regeneration energy to grow a new one." He wiggled the fingers of his right hand. 

"You're making my brain explode." Sherlock complained. 

"You're welcome." The Doctor smirked.

"So I transferred my regeneration energy to the hand, but then the Daleks threw Donna and the TARDIS into the engine of the ship, and she interfered with the regeneration energy in the hand and there was a metacrisis and it grew into a human version of myself, and Donna became part Time Lord, but a human can't handle having the mind of a Time Lord, so I... I- I had to erase her memories of me... After she defeated the Daleks, then I sent the human me to live with Rose in the alternate universe... So..."

"What happened to Jack and Martha?" Sherlock asked.

"Martha's going out with Rose's ex-boyfriend Mickey... And Jack's running Torchwood in Cardiff, you haven't heard-" He wondered.  
Sherlock shook his head "What went wrong with spacetime?"

The Doctor glanced distractedly at the now-cold tea in his hand. 

"In the Nineteenth century there was a writer by the name of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and he wrote stories about a detective called Sherlock Holmes and his assistant Dr. John Watson. These stories were extremely well known, and Sherlock Holmes's name became synonymous with powers of deduction. He had an older brother Mycroft with great influence in the government and his nemesis was known as Professor Moriarty. The only explanation I can come up with is that either the manuscript or the man himself has been consumed by a crack in spacetime, either falling out into the void, or being deposited somewhere in the distant cosmos, in either case, that would allow for the possibility, albeit a probabilistically variable possibility, for Sherlock Holmes the man to be actualized, of course this means absolutely nothing to you, for a variety of reasons."

Sherlock sighed. "This is rubbish."

"Profoundest rubbish." The Doctor agreed.

"There's nothing to do." 

"Gods of Gallifrey, I wish there was." 

"Shall we go?"

"Allons-y."

They do not move.


End file.
